Say it Now
by SevLovesLily
Summary: Post-Reichenbach: John's breakdown in his therapists's office and what happens from then until three years later. Implied romantic feelings, but technically no slash.


**I had this idea in my head, so I wrote it. While I would really like to write an ongoing Sherlock fic rather than the occasional one-shot, my ongoing (and currently novel-length) fanfic in which I'm rewriting the HP series from Snape's point of view just eats up my time. Also, I felt like making people cry. So be prepared to cry or at least get a little sad once you read this.**

**And just so you know, I ship John/Sherlock VERY hard. I just think realistically, and while it's tragic, I think that they're both in love with each other and have just yet to admit it. Not that I don't love fanart and fanfiction in which they're actually a couple. But in this, I've stayed as close to canon as I could, and so anything romantic is both implied and unfulfilled. Now get on to reading the angsty and depressed John.**

* * *

John sat on a vaguely familiar chair in a vaguely familiar room, and across from him was a vaguely familiar woman.

All of John's life, though, he had had a fairly good memory. There were things he'd seen that stood out vividly in his mind practically every time he closed his eyes—or at least every time before he'd met… well, you know. Things that should have traumatized him—and they did, until about a couple years ago, when he had been given a reason to be happy, a reason to hope. That thing was gone now. His mind, his heart, and his _soul_ were all in a state of utter disrepair; and the pain was all he could focus on.

But old memories of bullets zooming across open fields of land and hitting men right before his eyes and seeing his own friends dying after he had failed to fix them weren't going through his head at the moment. No, it wasn't those. It was all the memories he'd ever shared with… he couldn't bring himself to even think his name again. His best friend's name. Saying it once had been enough. And it didn't cease. Every second brought another violent surge of memories and another wave of pain. It was worse pain than John Watson, the ex-army doctor, had ever felt in his entire life. He'd had friends before and _watched them die_, but that had been _nothing_ compared to this. Never before had he felt so much towards one person, not even a woman he had wanted to get off with or even fancied a bit; and never before had he missed someone so much.

And that was why the room and everything around him felt so vague. John was in a terrible haze of pain, struggling to fight it back and not to break down like he so desperately wanted to. It kept him trapped in his own mind, which was something that he had always avoided. It was also something that his best friend had always had a tendency to do, and so the very fact that he felt so alone and trapped brought him more memories and more pain. He vaguely remembered his (seemingly) long cab ride to the office he hadn't been to in almost two years, as he did having sat down about ten minutes ago and having said a few things. They might have been answers to questions, or perhaps just nonsensical words to express everything he was feeling. He didn't remember, and he didn't feel like trying.

"There were things you wanted to say," his therapist said. It didn't jerk him completely back into reality, but she seemed to have not spoken for a long time, so he was definitely more aware than he had been. At this chance, John tried to cling onto real life and not revert to the bottomless pit of anguish in which he had been drowning in silence.

He gave a nod without looking at her, confirming what she'd said. It felt mechanical, not so much like a reflex, but like it was actually programmed into him. Perhaps he felt much too spent to try to lie. John was already tired, oh so _tired_ of it all. Of life. This pain had already aged him. And then, before his therapist continued, a thought in a full sentence somehow permeated the thick wall around his mind: _He was spent, I'm spent—why not just decide that my day is over and _go to bed_? I just want to go to fucking bed._

"But you couldn't," she said. John said nothing; he didn't even blink. The woman was just so bloody calm that he had the sudden urge to throttle her, despite the fact that her calmness was the reason he had come to her—it was her _job_. "Say it now."

_Say it now._ Those words echoed in his head, and with each reverberation off the walls of his skull, there was more throbbing pain. It suddenly became almost too gut-wrenching for him to handle, and he had to fight to keep it back. His heart seemed to be trying to sling-shot itself out of his chest, as though attempting to kill him by itself and put him out of his misery. He wished that it had succeeded.

Along with that was sudden nausea, and it was the kind where you feel a tugging in your esophagus and you just _know_ that you're going to be sick all over the floor in a second, but nothing happens, even though you really want it to. John wanted to. He wanted to vomit all the emotional pain out of him and then have the physical pain to numb it, as well as an excuse to cry. No one, after all, could be distraught to the point where they vomit, but then keep a straight face afterwards. Proof that you were far from okay broke a person, and he wanted to be broken.

Visibly broken, anyway. He felt that it might help, however strong he knew he needed to pretend to be.

After what felt like the longest time (though it had probably only been a few seconds), John shifted in his seat and opened his mouth to speak. He closed it at once, though, and he felt the habitual compulsion to lick his lips first. To curb his nausea, he inhaled deeply, and then said, "No, I'm sorry, I can't."

Still in his haze, he still wasn't looking at his therapist. Even if he had been, he wouldn't have _really_ been looking. He didn't see the point in trying to look anyone in the eye. He honestly didn't see the point in making an effort to do anything anymore. And for a moment, he was completely baffled as to why he had even come here. Had he _actually_ thought anything or anyone could help him? John was sure that absolutely nothing could help him. He was alone in his pain, and however tortuous it was, he needed it. It gave him something to feel. It gave him a large, extremely visible scar to show what he'd lost, and he most definitely did _not_ want to forget the person that he had lost.

But he wasn't going to blatantly show off that scar. The wound was still raw (he highly doubted it would ever even come close to healing), and he wasn't going to explain the history of that scar to anyone. He simply couldn't, he couldn't say it.

_Say it now._ No.

"You have to say it, John. You need to say it—to someone. Anyone. Anything. You'll regret it even more if you never say it."

_No._ If John ever said such personal things that he'd barely even allowed himself to admit in the privacy of his own heart, it couldn't be to anyone but the man they concerned. And it was too late for that, wasn't it?

Shifting again in his seat, he was no longer leaning on the side of the armchair. His neck was now arched as he held his head down, his eyes half-open and staring at his legs for no reason in particular. John's hands were on the cushion on either side of his legs, balling into fists and then relaxing again. All of this was simply unbearable.

Again, he inhaled deeply, and this time he felt his breath hitch and his chest tremble, like a dry heave. He ignored it.

"I… can't," John managed to choke out, unable to keep the random pitch-changes and dry sobs out of his voice. This was only becoming harder and harder, and he was well aware of what would eventually happen if he didn't just leave. Breathing loudly through his nose, he closed his eyes and straightened up a bit, and then pretended to look out the window. "You know I can't say it."

Silence for another minute. Bloody awful silence, and at the same time glorious, because John wanted to tear away at everything she was about to say, but he also wanted it to stay silent.

"I know it hurts, John, but you can say it. You secretly want to say it, I know you do."

John felt another dry heave try to come up, and it forced the word out of his mouth: "_How?_" He'd said it so brokenly that he might as well have only mouthed it. For the first time in several minutes that felt like years, he let his eyes rove up to meet his therapist's, and they did so with a stinging pain and longing for her to completely understand, to feel the same as he did. Her look didn't change except for the fact that it got a bit sadder.

"How…," he repeated, hoarsely but now a little more clearly, though his face was beginning to twist and tremble in anguish. And then, with the little breath he had left, and feeling as though some other force was taking over his body: "How could I _possibly_ say that—_that I loved him, and that I still love him, and he was the only person I've ever loved, and I'll never love anyone else, and—_"

With every word, John had sunk lower and lower into a pitiful position on his chair, as he simply couldn't bear the burden of sitting up straight anymore. It killed him to be showing this kind of weakness—_him,_ someone who had been a _soldier_ before—but it would have killed him with even worse pain to keep it all in. Each word had come out gradually huskier and huskier until he could no longer breathe, and at that word he had no choice but to stop and draw a long, shuddering, gasping breath. And his head went lower, now practically lying in his lap.

The silence was broken further as John continued to let out dry sobs, unable to help any of it. His face was burning, especially his eyes, which were becoming useless due to the tears welling in them, and the pain was more intense than ever.

"How could I—say _that_?" choked John in between sobs, no longer feeling like he was even talking to anyone in particular. His throat hurt badly enough that everything he said made it hurt worse, but he just needed to get those words out. It was becoming more difficult to string full sentences together, though. "I—I just… want… _Sherlock._" His best friend's name sounded inhuman when it came out of his mouth, and it hurt to say it. But it was sort of the good type of pain. "Sherlock… just—I want him here. I want him to come back. I… _I just want him back._"

_I want him back. I want Sherlock to come back._ As John held his forehead in his hands and broke down even further, those thoughts were all he could hear, echoing around inside his head. If his therapist was saying anything, he had no idea, and if he was saying anything back to her, he didn't know, either. But it likely would just have been a series of unintelligible noises if he was.

The next thing he knew, he was sitting in 221B again. He knew he couldn't have passed out and been brought here, so he figured that the therapy session had come to some sort of close and that he'd gotten a cab here, only being half-aware the whole time. Perhaps his mind was beginning to become more like Sherlock's and just delete everything that wasn't important.

That thought definitely didn't help him.

* * *

It never got any easier for him. As emotionally strong a man John Watson would have considered himself and was supposed to be, this was something he knew he would never move on from—not that he ever wanted to. Living without his best friend, the one person he loved more than anything, felt like having a limb removed and always feeling like it was still there. And then when he went to look, he was devastated every time he realized that it _wasn't_ there. Through all that time, he never stopped looking every time he felt it. Sometimes, he had truly convinced himself that he was going to see Sherlock walking beside him or playing violin when he got home from the shops before looking. And sometimes, the pain of being let down was almost too much to bear.

Sherlock had become like a vital organ to him, and now it was missing. John felt like he should have been dead, and knowing that he wasn't just made him suffer more. But he wasn't going to kill himself. The thought crossed his mind too many times to count over the next three years, but he knew that it's not what Sherlock would have wanted. He would have wanted John to carry on as best as he could. And that's what John was going to give him.

The wound didn't seem to be healing very much. The only progress time had made so far was that John could last at least a couple days without going into a lapse of depression. When that did happen, Mrs. Hudson would try to cheer him up, and when that didn't work, she would phone Lestrade and he would try to console him with some football. But it was really all useless, and they started to put less effort into it each time before giving up.

Oh, John still had friends—but compared to Sherlock, he could hardly actually consider them _friends_. Though he had known them for several years now, they felt more like people he spent a bit of time with and tolerated—occasionally enjoyed—the company of. He should have wanted to spend more time with them and talk to them more often, so as to keep Sherlock off of his mind and be happier, but John was stubborn. Perhaps he thought that allowing himself to feel the pain rather than avoiding it would somehow bring him back.

And if the Universe were fair at all, it would.

* * *

All through those three years, John kept having regular sessions with the therapist. Other than the return of his psychosomatic limp, though, he would often be unable to think of the reason that he still went. The sessions certainly didn't help him—he didn't need to figure out his feelings for Sherlock, since he had already done that. He already knew how he felt, and sitting in an armchair across from a woman who only told him that it was healthy to miss him but that _he had to find a way to move on_ was not going to change his way of thinking.

Although, he soon realized that the sessions did keep him strong, in a way. Talking to a therapist every week kept him from developing a drinking habit like his sister, or killing himself like he was sometimes sorely tempted to do. They kept him aware, they kept him just sane enough to survive—and he really did need them.

But one day, it wasn't enough. John left the office after a session that had failed to calm him down after his recent series of nightmares, which had all involved Sherlock falling and him being horrified. Try as she might have done, his therapist simply couldn't get it through to him that everything would be fine—because those nightmares had left him so affected that he knew for a fact they were never going to go away. She had looked sad and reluctant to let him leave, but his hour had been up and he had really wanted to get away from there.

With the image of Sherlock jumping off of St. Bart's and his body flailing before he hit the ground burned freshly into his mind as though it had happened yesterday, John was filled with the overwhelming desire to jump off the building as well. He was struggling to breathe properly as he limped his way to the main road, not looking at anyone as he passed, for the images continued to flash before his eyes. Finally, unable to take it anymore—just absolutely _spent_ and distraught more than anyone could ever know, he let his feet take him with a sharp turn into an alleyway in between buildings that was directly to his left. John immediately leaned against the brick wall, glad for the shadows and that no one would notice, breathing deeply in an effort trying to calm his erratic breathing.

Having run through a lot of the backstreets of London with Sherlock before, John needed only to glance towards the main street to know that, from where he was, he could do it so easily. He could get to the fire escape ladder behind the building he was leaning up against, and then jump between the rooftops for only about a minute before reaching St. Bart's. It would be that easy, and it felt so appealing right now.

Minutes later, after John had just stood there, thinking, his eyes adopted a sort of glazed look, and, apparently involuntarily, his left leg inched toward the back of the building.

But before he could break into a run or even do much more than inhale, John felt a hand grip his right shoulder—a firm hand, a warm hand… a very familiar-feeling hand. He stopped and furrowed his brow, the hand still on his shoulder, but refused to believe what simply _couldn't_ be possible. It was more likely than not just his imagination, and if it wasn't, it was a mugger, and then he would have been in trouble.

Slowly, John turned his head around to see a hooded man next to him, who then pulled down the hood, revealing a face that was _impossible_ for him to see. It couldn't be there, it wasn't—_it can't_. But whether or not it was real or if he had fallen asleep in the dirty alleyway, he didn't dare look away, lest the vision disappear.

"I know what you want to do, John," said Sherlock, his hand moving to John's neck. "Please don't. You don't need to do that. Not anymore."

* * *

**And that is just one of my many theories of how Sherlock will return in Season 3. Please review, and tell me what you thought! Mostly, tell me whether I made you sad or not.**


End file.
